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By Timour Azhari BAGHDAD (Reuters) -Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani held talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus

Iraq’s prime minister held talks Sunday with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus during the first trip of its kind to the war-torn country since the 12-year conflict began. Iraq and Syria have had close relations for years even after many Arab countries withdrew their ambassadors for Damascus and Syria’s membership in the 22-member Arab League was suspended because of the crackdown on protesters in 2011. Assad received Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who was heading a high-ranking delegation, at the presidential palace in Damascus. They discussed mutual relations and cooperation between the two neighboring countries among other issues, according to the office of Syria’s president. Al-Sudani’s office said in a statement that talks revolved around ways of expanding cooperation in the fields of trade, economy, transportation, tourism, how to combat climate change and collaboration to fight terrorism. Security cooperation against extremist groups was likely to be on top of the two-day visit's agenda. The two countries, where Iran enjoys wide influence, have a joint 600 kilometers-long (373 miles) border. In June 2014, the Islamic State group declared the establishment of a self-styled “caliphate,” a traditional model of Islamic rule, in wide areas under its control in Iraq and Syria. After a yearslong campaign that left tens of thousands dead in both countries, IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in March 2019 in Syria. Over the past years, Syrian government forces regained control of much of Syria with the help of Russia and Iran. Earlier this year, Syria’s membership in the Arab League was reinstated and Assad attended the Arab summit that was held in Saudi Arabia in May. Al-Sudani was invited to visit Damascus during a trip by Syria’s Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad to Baghdad last month. The U.S. has a presence in both Syria and Iraq and Syrian officials have been calling for the withdrawal of American troops from the country who first arrived in 2015. On any given day there are at least 900 U.S. forces in Syria, along with an undisclosed number of contractors attempting to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State group. U.S. special operations forces also move in and out of the country but are usually in small teams and are not included in the official count. U.S.-led coalition forces have officially ended their combat mission in Iraq, but continue to play an advisory role to Iraqi forces in the fight against the Islamic State extremist group. Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide

2024 is shaping up to be the kind of election Joe Biden could lose primarily because of a third-party candidacy.

US treasury secretary Janet Yellen is back in India for the third time in nine months, this time to meet finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations about global economic challenges like the increased threat of debt defaults facing low-income countries. Ms Yellen will use her time in Gandhinagar to try to foster warming relations between the US and India. She also plans a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam, to address supply chain reliability, clean energy transition and other matters of economic resilience. Ms Yellen's goals for her time in India: press for debt restructuring in developing countries in economic distress, push to modernize global development banks to make them more climate-focused and deepen the ever-growing US-India relationship. Ms Yellen’s frequent stops in the country signal the importance of that relationship at a time of of tensions with China. India’s longstanding relationship with Russia also will loom as the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine continues despite US and allied countries’ efforts to sanction and economically bludgeon Russia's economy. India has not taken part in the efforts to punish Russia and maintains energy trade with that country despite a Group of Seven agreed-upon price cap on Russian oil, which has seen some success in slowing Russia's economy. Still, the US increasingly relies on India and has courted its leaders. President Joe Biden hosted a White House state visit honoring Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in June, designed to highlight and foster ties. The two leaders pronounced the US-India relationship never stronger and rolled out new business deals between the nations. Raymond Vickery Jr, a policy expert on US-India relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Ms Yellen's coming to India shortly after visiting China is meaningful in that Indian officials “are going to want to know in great detail what happened in the meetings with her Chinese counterparts and see where it fits with their perspective on economic relations with China.” “They’re going to want to know whether or not the United States is serious about moving some of its sourcing activity from China to India.” A senior Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview Ms Yellen’s trip, said there was hope that debt treatments for Ghana and Sri Lanka will be discussed and completed quickly at the meetings. Sri Lanka and Ghana defaulted on their international debts last year, roughly two years after Zambia defaulted. And more than half of all low-income countries face debt distress, which hurts their long-term ability to function and develop. Last month, Zambia and its government creditors, including China, reached a deal to restructure $6.3bn in loans, on the sidelines of a global finance summit in Paris. The agreement covers loans from countries such as France, the U.K., South Africa, Israel and India as well as China – Zambia’s biggest creditor at $4.1bn of the total. The deal may provide a roadmap for how China will handle restructuring deals with other nations in debt distress. Ms Yellen’s trip comes shortly after she spent a week in China, meeting the nation’s finance ministry and discussing mutual trade restrictions and national security concerns. Harold W Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Ms Yellen's trip to India “is a reflection of a naturally developing alliance.” “India has a great deal of tension with China – they have constant border disputes,” he said. “And India wants to develop and has developed into sort of an Indian Ocean naval power, which is also a region that China wants to develop." Read More What Britain needs is a ‘grown-up’ relationship with China US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits China as part of efforts to sooth strained relations Yellen says Washington might 'respond to unintended consequences' for China due to tech export curbs Janet Yellen expresses hopes her Beijing visit has put US-China ties on a ‘surer footing’ Janet Yellen highlights record US-China trade and talks ‘fair rules’ during Beijing visit Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide

At least 37 people have died and nine are missing in flooding and landslides across storm-battered South Korea,

US Climate Envoy John Kerry arrived in China on Sunday for three full days of talks that will

British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Sunday he plans to resign at the next Cabinet reshuffle after four years in the job. Wallace has served as defense secretary under three prime ministers and played a key role in the U.K.'s response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He told The Sunday Times his departure was due to the strain his job had put on his family. He also said he would stand down as a lawmaker at the next general election. Wallace is the longest continuously serving minister in government. He was security minister under former Prime Minister Theresa May, before being promoted to defense secretary by her successor Boris Johnson. Wallace drew criticism last week when he suggested that Ukraine should show “gratitude” for the West's military support. He made the remark at the NATO summit in Lithuania after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed frustration about when his country could join the military alliance. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak distanced himself from Wallace's comments, saying Zelenskyy had “expressed his gratitude for what we've done on a number of occasions.” Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide

At least 4,000 people have been evacuated as a forest fire burned out of control on the Spanish

MOSCOW President Vladimir Putin said Russia had a "sufficient stockpile" of cluster bombs and reserved the right to

A tsunami advisory issued after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck off the coast of Alaska late Saturday has since been canceled, officials said.

The floor of Crawford Lake in Ontario acts like a storybook, preserving Earth’s recent history in chronological order. Crawford Lake reveals the activities of local Iroquoian communities from the late 13th to 15th centuries, all the way through to the present day. This is because Crawford Lake is a meromictic lake, meaning that the dense bottom layer of water does not mix with the less dense upper layers. “The isolated bottom layer of water remains under disturbed, enabling the accumulation of clearly laminated valves which record precise information about the time during which they were deposited,” according to the Anthropocene Working Group. Experts have nominated Crawford Lake as representation for the start of the Anthropocene epoch, a proposed new geological era characterised by significant changes to the planet’s surface as a result of human behaviour. The Anthropocene is yet to be officially accepted as a unit of geologic time, but in 2016 a working group under the guidance of an International Commission on Stratigraphy subcommittee agreed that human behaviour has left scars so deep that they will remain evident even into the distant future. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter One of the most notable markers of the Anthropocene is the appearance of plutonium, a radioactive material that appeared in the mid-20th century as a result of hydrogen bomb tests. “The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global ‘fingerprint’ on our planet,” explained Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group. “In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect.” Agreeing on a simple measure that defines the boundary between chapters in Earth’s history is just the first step. This measure requires agreement among scientists on a single location to define the boundaries. Known as the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, or a golden spike, plays a crucial role in standardising these borders between epochs. The Anthropocene Working Group has been evaluating potential golden spike sites, from Oued Akrech, Morocco, to Alano di Piave, Italy. After spending three years assessing the qualities of a dozen potential golden spikes for the Anthropocene, finally the AGW has landed on Crawford Lake. “Crawford Lake is so special because it allows us to see at annual resolution the changes in Earth history throughout two separate periods of human impact on this small lake,” micropalaeontologist Francine McCarthy of Brock University in Canada, a voting member of the AGW, said at a press briefing. The lake’s unique properties, such as its small size, depth, and lack of water mixing create sediments that precisely record environmental changes over the past millennia. To officially establish the Anthropocene in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the golden spike at Crawford Lake must undergo a series of voting by various commissions and unions. If successful, it will mark the moment when human activities permanently altered the planet. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Turkey boosted its fuel taxes by almost 200% on Sunday, a move that will magnify inflationary pressures and